B&O BeoVision 7-40 40in LCD TV

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Review Price: £7469.00

If you buy a B&O TV you can be sure of two things: first, you’re a lot better off than the rest of us. Second, your hefty dollop of cash is getting you way more than just a TV. For B&O TVs tend to be more works of art and labours of love than humble goggleboxes – and the company’s new BeoVision 7-40 40in LCD TV is no different. With knobs on.

In fact, look under either ‘sumptuous’ or ‘opulent’ in your dictionary and we wouldn’t be surprised if you find a picture of the BeoVision 7-40 staring out at you. Everything about it oozes quality, from its glass-finished, high-gloss black screen frame through to its anodised aluminium outer trim – and you can feel the quality as well as see it.

That’s just the TV, too. Add in the stand options (especially the £425 extra ‘pole’ floorstanding one); the fact that the silver bits can be had instead in black, dark grey, red, blue or even a bespoke colour; and the extraordinary external speaker ‘bar’ positioned under the screen, and you’ll probably be thinking you’ve died and gone to TV heaven.

The speaker bar needs a little more attention, as it comes in two very different flavours. The one most people will probably get is the ‘7-2’ – a three-way stereo speaker. But there’s also a ‘7-4’ mono option designed for people wanting a centre speaker as part of a B&O surround sound speaker package.

If you’ve studied the pictures of the BeoVision 7-40 closely, you may have noticed a sexy little bulge under the centre of the screen. This isn’t just there for aesthetic reasons. For if you run your fingers underneath it a rather amazing thing happens: without so much as a whisper a built-in disc tray slides down, round and out of the bulge, ready to take a DVD or CD of your choice. There’s even a light built into the tray to help you see what you’re doing in a darkened room, for heaven’s sake. If there’s a cooler trick in the TV world right now, we ain’t seen it.